Before going into this, please understand the human behind this. I deeply respect the work DevRel does for us and I hope it to be a point of making things better for everyone and not an attack on any person or team.
This is likely to be a popular topic so for my sake; please be kind, respectful, and on topic.
As a Roblox developer in Europe, it is currently too hard to make reasonable plans for RDC. It’s less than two months away and the last we publicly heard about RDC was in April. This does not give time for all the international developers who need to fly in for RDC.
There are no doubt some massive devs who are unable to cross now because of how close it is, I’m aware of those in Indonesia who just can’t travel now, it’s too late.
I understand the inherent problems with the yearly planning an event like RDC and that you don’t want to disappoint by saying something and then being forced to delay, but we’re at the stage where your lack of word is causing massive problems for your developers. Most of who are university students and are debating between this and freshers week at college/university because of the time you picked.
At this stage DevRel needs to be honest with what’s going on now and in the future, when all you have is rumours you’ve created a worse problem than being honest with the community.
Some of your core values are “Respect the community” and “take the long view”, this kind of silence is not respectful and harms developers who see the planning as a joke and they just don’t bother coming back, or add it to the list for all the reasons they choose not to develop here again.
In the immediate, DevRel needs to be honest with what’s going on with this RDC.
In the longer term, create an incident report which looks at this problem and the historic problem, and try to resolve it. I hope you find some great new hires with the two new roles, but in the immediate it needs some disclosure and some transparency.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it allows me to keep developing and not worry about RDC. Maybe I got my tickets 3 months ahead, flights and hotels all booked. I just get back to do what we all want to do, be developers. Thanks all for reading this.